


Bargain

by Lyssandra_Med



Series: One-Shot [49]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Creature Bellatrix Black Lestrange, Creature Fic, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, F/F, Fae & Fairies, No moral, Plague
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:21:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23776774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyssandra_Med/pseuds/Lyssandra_Med
Summary: Hermione makes a deal that she doesn't understand.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Bellatrix Black Lestrange
Series: One-Shot [49]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1429282
Comments: 9
Kudos: 85





	Bargain

**Author's Note:**

> Unedited / No-Beta

Finding the hallowed ground mapped out in the back of a book she had found in a rotten old farmhouse was supposed to be harder than this.

Hermione moved slowly through the undergrowth with undue care and couldn’t help but wonder that all the warnings must have been wrong. This trip was by far faster and safer than any she had been on recently, especially since the roads outside of her village were taken over by bandits stricken with the plague.

She had no time beyond those measly thoughts to contemplate exactly what she was hiking into. She pushed past brambles with soft spines, crossed dry streambeds that hadn’t seen water in ages, and found her footing easily paced by steady rocks and a lack of protruding roots. The warnings had stated this trail to be arduous and nigh impassable.

Wrong, obviously.

This fairweather walk was worth it. Whatever price she would have to pay would be worth it. There was simply no other solution for her to turn to except tales from old books rhymes passed down from parent to child. Nothing else could cure her parent’s sickness and while she had stubbornly clung to science and sanity for as long as she could, she was at her wit’s end.

Science and reality were a pale comfort to the nigh certainty of her parent’s death. Science said there was no cure once the blackened spots began to appear on the sufferer’s flesh.

Hermione could not let that happen. She could  _ not _ let her parents succumb to this sickness, this rot, this infernal blight brought upon them by the King’s failing. She could  _ not _ let this happen, for her sake and their own.

That was selfish of her, wasn’t it? She knew it deep, deep where all her darker thoughts resided. It rode heavy in her mind as she followed the well-worn trail and wiped a light sweat from her brow. 

Her parents were the only people keeping her safe. No one else in the village would vouch for her should the Inquisitor’s return, they were the only ones who could talk the other villagers into quietude whenever she was spotted doing something considered heretical. 

Their frustrations at their own lot were only kept in check by the studious capability of her father, and the charming comfort of her mother. 

The villagers could call her a witch, and her parents would yet defend her. But if they were to fall to this plague?

Well. Hermione knew that path ended upon a pyre.

Hermione gulped and hurried just a  _ little _ bit faster through the forest.

\---

By the time Hermione reached the borders of the lands called Fae, she couldn’t even tell that she was standing in her own world. It all  _ looked _ the same, or it was just similar enough not to cause her alarm. But the veil? The silken barrier that had caressed her skin as she wandered through, the sudden change that felt more like a spiderweb than a door?

She knew it was not the same, even as her eyes lied to her. Knew then just how frightfully easy it must have been for children to venture out and not return.

Hermione moved from a trail still littered with the random detritus of a forest to one in much more pristine condition. Her steps were even and level, not even gravel marring her passage. Eventually, after another few minutes of following its meandering path, she met cobblestone. She paused when her heel bounced upon the stone and reached down to lay a finger across the marbled pattern. 

The rock was aged, worn smooth and still. Cracks spiderwebbed each portion and filled themselves in with a colour similar to the whole but  _ off. _ Just off enough that she could see but not detect the difference with the pad of her hand.

“Ah, you’re here.” said a voice from Hermione’s side, so abrupt and so startling that she fell backwards upon her rear and gazed wildly in every direction. It was feminine and luscious, darkly inviting and older than time.

When her imitation of a common owl faded she could still see no sign of the owner to the voice, there was no one around her and no one behind.

“Well, let’s begin. Why are you here?” said the voice, again coming from somewhere and nowhere. The tones were luscious and dark, equally delightful and frightful to Hermione’s now confused mind. 

She struggled up to her feet and brushed off the thin layer of dirt that had caked her trousers, “I’m here to bargain with a Fae. I have a need, a want.” 

“Oh Pet,” the voice rumbled out at her from the encroaching darkness, filling Hermione with lyrical tones and piercing her heart with a thin knife of fear. “What is it that you desire? Money? Land?  _ Respect?” _

This was finally it. This was her moment, the chance she had been dreading and wondering over and waiting for.  _ Something _ was out here, this was what she had wanted!

So why did she feel locked up? Why did something like ice crawl down her spine at the thought of answering that dark question?

Her mouth opened. Closed. Waiting, holding, malfunctioning.

_ Why was she waiting? _

Seconds continued to pass her by while Hermione let nothing pass between them. The Fae remained hidden, shrouded and obscure, and Hermione remained motionless except her bewildered face.

“Show yourself!” she suddenly exclaimed, thrown out of her statuette form and back into the flesh of the living. By all the Gods this was ridiculous and she knew it. But she also  _ needed _ to see this creature, this woman, this  _ thing _ that she was bargaining with. 

“Oh. Is that all? How boring.” The hidden voice dropped until it was a whisper, a purr against Hermione’s ears, “So simple then. If I had known that was all you’d wanted then I would have-”

“No!” Hermione interrupted the speaker without a thought to the consequences, her voice a squeak that pained her own ears. “No, no. It’s just that I wanted, well, I want to see you while we speak. Please.”

A harsh shiver overtook Hermione’s body as she waited on a reply, the air around her swirling with a cold chill that had been absent when she set out on her mission. She was dumbfounded in the wake of her question, stupified by her own audacity. Why? Why in the world had she ever asked that?

No answer was forthcoming as she thought it over. There was only the incessant curiosity locked within her heart, a  _ need _ so powerful she could not overcome it. She  _ wanted _ to know. A voice could be anyone at all, could be a ruffian along the edges of the trail or a charlatan hawking snake oil. Vision would be so much more revealing no matter how much it frightened her.

The woods were silent as she waited. At once the trees alongside her were heavy and dark, burgeoning with life and still managing to draw down upon her with all the force of a disapproving stare. The swaying wind shook branch and leaf, disturbed what little detritus there was until the constant sounds took on a menacing tone. The sun that had been up above her was nearing darkness now and filtered its way through bramble and bough until Hermione was sure enough to her bones that time did not work well here.

Darkness was arriving.

Her heartbeat took to an unsettling pace, rocketing backwards and forwards against the interior of her ribs until she worried that something might go wrong in there. 

How ridiculous would that be? Get all this way, come so far, only to leave her parents dying all alone while her own heart gave out. What a pitiful-

Well. It  _ would _ have been a pitiful way to go if a sliver of light hadn’t suddenly reached out towards her from between the swirling mist. It was slight and pearlescent, reflecting only a little of what sunshine was reaching down. Hermione kept her eyes wide open as someone began to shift forward through that mist, clutched her hand to her cloak and stomped back the skittish desire to flee.

A predator was approaching her. A creature tall and dark, and oh so very bright. Legs twisted and stepped between plantlife. Revealed, bit by bit, the slender form of a person nearly a head taller than Hermione herself. Their skin was patterned and shifting, coloured starkly as it was by bloodred loops and whorls of ancient glyphs. Black hair fell down upon the beings shoulders in twists like knots and bundles that swayed with her gait. 

A predator through and through. Hermione stifled the errant thought that she was a mouse about to be clenched tightly between sharp talons, fought back a stutter and sudden tears. 

Or she would have, had not all that been thrown aside by the sudden wonder of her situation. The beauty of the Fae, the magnificence barely held back by her tempered strides. Sudden arousal and baffling terror assaulted Hermione in equal portion until she could hardly keep back a keening noise from between her lips, face suddenly flushed with heat that warmed her cheeks and tingled her lips.

A pretty but dangerous being. A body one could properly die for, or from.

“Well, I’m here now. So, Little one,” the woman -  _ creature _ \- uttered, her voice far closer to Hermione than the body itself. “What is your desire?”

“M-my desire?” Hermione stuttered out her words with mouth agape and eyes that seemed firmly intent on drinking in the Fae standing before her.

The Fae did not so much  _ walk _ towards Hermione as she  _ swam. _ Those last few meters of distance were crossed with an eerie silence, her hair a wavering backdrop that floated and moved to its own tune. 

And then she was standing before Hermione, mere centimetres from her own face.

So startled was Hermione that she gaped and sputtered a whisper of shock, body leaning back even as her planted feet refused to move. Unable to fall away, unable to push to the side, to twist or do anything at all.

A hand reached out to grasp at Hermione’s shoulder, fingers as cold as ice and burning through the thin layer of her tunic. It burned, it sank, it forced Hermione into a wince as she was suddenly reminded of just why she had ventured out here in the first place.

“Please! Please, I need a cure to save my family. It’s my parents, they’re sick and if I don’t manage to find something that will cure them they’ll- they’ll die.” 

Hermione stood there and panted in her breath, her body suddenly unused to speaking and rapidly finding that all her strength had been sapped in the effort. She looked up into that face, the Fae still standing close to her and staring down just as intently. The eyes were almost too much for her to handle, too much for her to understand. A golden twist ran through them and twinned with burnished silver, a shifting that seemed to sparkle and glint despite the lack of light.

A brightness there one moment, gone the next, appearing once again and fading just as swiftly.

Ethereal and enrapturing, so much more interesting than the words passing between them.

**_“Deal.”_ **

\---

When Hermione came back to herself she was safely ensconced in woollen blankets atop a hay stuffed mattress.

She couldn’t exactly remember just how she had managed to find her way back or what exactly had been said during those fading moments in the forest. She could just barely recall something, something that scratched and itched along the inside of her mind. Something that was an intruder, an observer, a darkly twisted thing that filled with pleasure over what had been hidden.

None of it mattered though. Her odd feelings could be ignored. Whatever she had agreed to give away for the miracle was meaningless in the face of witnessing said magic come to life. Meaningless when her father stirred from his own bed. Meaningless when her mother stood up to stoke a fire just as she had before the sickness came to their village.

There were no black splotches on their skin. No veins dark and angered, no infection to burn out.

They were alive, and all else was meaningless.

\---

Days returned to normal. Days passed her by. Days moved from one moment to the next, from picking weeds between their crops to studying deep within the rectory. Blazing her way through piles of books while her parents mended what they could, tended to what they wanted.

The townsfolk surrounding them continued on a march towards death. The disease still ravaged outside of their home.

But they were alive, and that was all that mattered.

\---

Weeks turned into months.  _ Something _ remained along the periphery of Hermione’s vision. Something that was a worry, was confusion, was broken in a way that left Hermione turning it all over only to reveal nothing at all.

The encounter she had deep within the forest was slowly becoming dreamlike and faint. She could, every once in a while, find herself wondering whether it had even really happened. Wondered if it were a dream and not some desperate bargain that she had made with a creature that should not have existed.

Whenever those thoughts would fall upon her she would turn back her minds-eye to the Fae woman instead of the bargain. She could remember that. The cold that had licked her heels, the unease that had settled into her gut. She could count on that having been real, those eyes and that body.  _ Surely _ her mind had not made that up.

Or had it?

\---

Time proved it real. Proved she had done something and something had been done to her. It had happened, and she would live with the consequences.

No one survived. No one in the little village had made it out alive. Time took them all away, left stray dogs to roam the streets and other creatures to rule the night. 

They were alone now and nearly forgotten.

Not her. Not her parents. They  _ lived. _

Lived healthy and whole even as they fought to salvage what they could. Turned the creatures their friends and acquaintances had owned over to fields and unlocked pastures. They opened all the doors and dragged out bodies to a burn pit that was fed by broken woods and manmade tallow.

They continued to fight against the encroaching disrepair of the village proper. Fought to keep everything running smoothly, and within a fortnight of deciding to do so, Hermione had become an expert on all the little things that she could keep running. Things that could keep them all alive.

She emptied the rectory of all its fancy words and shoved them into a hut adjoining her parents. The space was cleared of all its previous occupants and filled instead with hardbacked tomes and sheaves of paper. Pots of charcoal littered her space and pages she had written and discarded, theories she had posited and then erased, all of it filled her newly chosen home.

She taught herself everything that she could, passed along all the things she couldn’t accomplish on her own, worked tirelessly every day and night to help with keeping them all alive.

The plague that ravaged them all was gone but now they faced mortality in a different form, one that peered out at them from emptied huts with eyes shining with hunger, angry and red. Starvation hounded them, no one was around them,  _ nothing _ would be coming to save them. 

Hermione slept deeply and dreamed of architecture and tasks, dreamed of things she needed to accomplish but that had no time to be finished. The meeting in the forest had been all but forgotten. It was edged out slowly until it occupied a narrow sliver of her mind and seemed more a curiously engrossing fantasy than anything else.

Remained that way for days, up until her father died.

Remained that way for days, until he decided he would fix up a fence. Enlarge the property just a bit, give all their newly liberated goats just that much more room to graze and prosper. A thin sliver of wood had embedded itself into his thumb and been left alone, so slight and minor had the moment been.

Something so simple and so clean, something that had wasted him away in three days after the angry lines of infection bled up his arm in red instead of black.

Her mother faltered not long after. 

The dreams began the night after Hermione buried her mother by her father’s side. Or perhaps it was better stated that the memories surfaced, rather than the dreams returned. They had been ongoing, roiling beneath the surface of her mind and gone before she could remember them.

That was the case no longer. Now she remembered every moment, the lips pressed against hers and the taste of blood from one to the other. Now she remembered the eyes that pierced her own and the fear that followed with them. She remembered the beauty and the bargain.

_ “Save them.” she had asked, pleaded and grovelled on her knees and ran soft hands upon the icy legs of a creature beyond this veil. _

_ “I will,” had come as a reply, quiet and piercing and  _ **_delightful_ ** _ to Hermoine’s ears. “And when I do, you will lose something that you love. When you do, you will be mine.” _

_ “How?” she asked, voice drowned by a growing desire. _

_ The creature had peered down at her, caressed her cheek and dragged claws underneath her chin, “What is your name?” _

_ She hadn’t recalled for a second, for a moment. Had stared and gaped until a word fell upon her lips, “Hermione.” _

_ The Fae had grinned, cruel and sharp and  _ **_wanting._ ** __

_ “I am Bellatrix, and you will be mine.” _

She could remember that conversation fully now. She could recall with exquisite detail exactly how enrapturing the moment had been, how enthusiastically she had agreed.

She must have assumed the creature meant something simple. Something quaint but ironic. Her eyes perhaps, or her words. Maybe even her books. 

But not her parents.  _ Never _ her parents. She had been so sure that they would live long and happy years, safe and protected from all that could ail them.

The Fae woman hadn’t lied to her. She hadn’t cajoled her to that decision and she hadn’t eagerly prophesized their downfall.

The Fae had fulfilled her end of the bargain, and now it was Hermione’s turn.

\---

The villagers who returned were startled by the level of destruction that had been wrought. 

Nowhere else for a thousand leagues had suffered quite like these folk. All of them gone, dead and buried by whoever had been the last to go.

No one resettled. They salted the earth, burned the huts, wiped it from their maps and did their level best to forget that it all existed.

Pretended not to notice thin silhouettes within the mist that permeated the nearby forest, pretended not to see two women standing side by side and the crackling ice of their mirrored grins.


End file.
